The Sages taught: When the Temple was destroyed for the first time, many groups of young priests gathered together with the Temple keys in their hands. And they ascended to the roof of the Sanctuary and said: “Master of the Universe, since we did not merit to be faithful treasurers, let the keys be handed to You.” And they threw them upward, and a kind of palm of a hand emerged and received from them. And the young priests jumped and fell into the fire.
—Ta’anit 29a
The helicopter found us, rushed us to a small, local hospital. The medics told us it was Thursday: we’d arrived at Horeb on Tuesday, and somehow Wednesday was gone. I remember rousing momentarily, just as we took off. The pilot muttered about how the area looked like Sodom and Gomorrah, overturned.
Curious prodding ensued at the hospital. I received stitches. Evan’s leg was in rough shape. Oliver’s vision still hadn’t returned. Amir was untouched, save for minor bruises. We were each treated for dehydration and trauma.
They were baffled by Noah’s death. They were running tests, they claimed, they should know more soon. Theories formed, interrogations followed. What kind of LSD? Had he fallen ill? Where did we find shelter during the storm? Their last question, presented with lowered voices, made me nauseous: did I suspect foul play?
One by one, our parents flew up. What happened to their boys? Why didn’t the doctors know anything? Another IV in my veins, I heard from down the hall what I’d been dreading most: the sonic cry of Noah’s mother and father.
In my own room, my mother retreated from me, her body crumpled against the door. “How could you do this to us?” She asked this several times, eliciting nothing but silence. My father, beside her, wept into his hands.
* * *
NOAH WAS ALL ANYONE IN Zion Hills spoke about. People wept openly in the streets, in the butcher, in shul. I was reminded, all the while, of the way I thought of Noah when I’d first moved to town: hero, marvel, everyone’s favorite son.
Nasty rumors circulated, too. By the time we returned home, we were no longer victims in the public eye. They found LSD in our systems, weed in our belongings; our stories conflicted radically, even the parts we weren’t frightened to share. The truth—that we didn’t know what happened, that we had no explanation for Oliver’s onset of blindness or Noah’s death—was beside the point. TRAGIC TEENAGE CULT, one headline read. ACID TRIP KILLS BASKETBALL STAR. Allegations became increasingly outrageous: group sex, animal sacrifice, colonizing the forest, conspiring to murder Noah.
The difficulty with that last theory, of course, was the continued failure to diagnose Noah’s death. There’d be no autopsy, Cynthia decided, despite the protests of the police and the hospital, as it’d be a desecration of the human body under Jewish law. There were no clear signs of trauma. It didn’t seem as if he’d overdosed. There were no traces of poison, no signs of violence. It was shocking, it was heartbreaking, it was grotesque and it remained unanswerable: the death of Noah Harris was a medical mystery.
Late Thursday night, Eddie Harris knocked on my front door. My heart endured a glacial plunge. I thought, at first, he’d come to confront me, to shake me until at last I provided real answers. But Eddie was gentle, disoriented, half-shaven, scarcely capable of concentrating on full sentences. He looked as if he’d been tranquilized, and I realized he likely was.
“Ari,” he said, refusing to cross the threshold of my doorway, pawing at his eyes, “Ari, what am I going to do? What are any of us going to do?”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
“This was my little boy, Ari. This was the . . . the absolute pride of my existence.”
“Eddie,” I said, the words forming too slowly in my mind, my surroundings sterile now and out of focus, “you should know he was the single greatest person I’ve ever met.”
He cried, which in turn made me cry. We cried together, standing at my doorway.
“I came here to ask—” My head was on his shoulder. I was prepared in that moment to submit myself: for questioning, for capital punishment, for anything that might possibly diminish Eddie’s grief. “You don’t know how much my boy valued your friendship,” he said, wiping at his face, “and Cyn and I adore you, adore your parents. And, well, we want you to know we don’t blame you for what happened, for whatever happened out there and . . . Noah was always going on about what a freaking genius you were, a, uh, a real wordsmith. He always insisted that, did you know?” Eddie lowered his voice, released me from his grip. “Would you speak at the funeral? Would you do that for us?”
I told him it’d be an honor. We shook hands. I felt sick.
* * *
THAT NIGHT I DREAMT OF NOAH. I was sitting in a lecture hall when suddenly he came ambling down my row, muttering apologies as he climbed over legs, targeting the seat to my right. He wore his usual smile, despite the fact that his blond hair was streaked with twigs and luminescent dust.
“Sorry to drop in unannounced,” he said, sinking beside me. His voice was unchanged. His left eye, I noticed, had turned a slightly lighter shade of green than his right.
We shook hands. “I didn’t expect to see you for quite some time,” I said.
“How long has it been?”
“Only a few weeks.”
“That’s right.” He slung an arm around the back of my chair. “Still getting the hang of the whole time zone conversion thing.” Someone in the row ahead turned, delivering a glare. We nodded our apologies.
“How long can you stay?”
He checked his wristwatch. “Till dawn breaks. Can’t really miss my shift.”
“I—I don’t understand,” I said, lowering my voice. “How’d you get here?”
“Alone. They make you go alone.”
“They do?” And then, furrowing my brow: “That’s not what I meant.”
“I got here the same way I got there in the first place.”
“Fine, never mind that. What’s it like there?”
“Well, it’s pretty damn busy,” he said. “Not much time for yourself, not much privacy. Good intramural leagues, though. You’ll never believe who’s on my team.”
“Who?”
“Afraid I can’t reveal that.” And then, leaning forward, dropping his voice: “But let’s just say our power forward once gave a pretty rousing spiel in Gettysburg.” He winked and put a finger to his lips.
“Can you—” I paused, leaned closer. “Can you tell me about God?”
“What about Him?”
“What’s He like?”
Noah sighed. “Always with the questions, Ari. Don’t you enjoy some mystery?” When I shook my head he pointed to the front of the hall, at the lecturer onstage. A familiar figure—small, scrawny, no older than eight—was on his tiptoes, scratching equations on the blackboard. I raised my brows in surprise. Noah laughed, doubling over, gasping for air, and then I woke.
* * *
THE FUNERAL WAS LATE AFTERNOON, right before Shabbat. They picked a plot in the center of Grove Street Cemetery, next to where Cynthia’s father, Noah’s namesake, was buried. There was a service first in the chapel—cramped, heavily carpeted, dimly lit—in which everyone fought for seats. It was unimaginably crowded, standing room only. I sat, with my parents, toward the front, near the Samsons and Bellows. The Starks hadn’t come.
It was a long service. Noah’s older sister, a senior at UCLA, had a difficult time relaying much between sobs. Rabbi Bloom, when he went, stressed that “Noah Harris was the embodiment of lev tov, a good heart to which all clung.” Extemporaneously, Rocky stood to speak, only to insist that Noah was the most impressive athlete handed to the Jewish people since Sandy Koufax.
When it was my turn, I walked slowly to the lectern, glancing at the coffin beside me before turning to the crowd. I could see people waiting outside the chapel, unable to gain entry. My gaze moved from Oliver, in his dark shades, to Amir, mournful and, shockingly, shorn of his beard, to Sophia, her delicate crescent of a face formerly but no longer the answer to every question I’d ever posed. I cleared my throat, too loudly, into the microphone, fumbled for the mostly incoherent notes I’d scribbled when I couldn’t sleep. Sophia, her arm around Rebecca, eyed me sadly.
“‘Who mourns for Adonais?’” A rush of disassociation: I gripped the lectern, lifted my head to the crowd. Undifferentiated faces blinked at me, faces of a world reduced abruptly to anonymity and flickering movements and indistinguishable forms of private sorrow. “Today, in this nightmare, we mourn Noah, our Adonais. Eulogizing his dear friend John Keats, the poet Percy Shelley wonders why it is we dread waking from this dream of life. Beyond this world, Shelley claims, awaits peace. Here, however, ’tis we who are ‘lost in stormy visions,’ we who ‘decay / Like corpses in a charnel.’ If this is the case, then what is it that . . . that shatters us in these moments?”
The other time I’d been to this cemetery, I realized, was with Noah. Several hundred yards away, Caroline Stark rested in the earth. “The day I met Noah Harris,” I said, voice choking slightly, “happened to be the day I met the first true friend I’ve ever made. It would be impossible, really, for me to overstate the extent to which his kindness had a profound impact on me.” Oliver’s unseeing eyes were on the floor. Amir glared in my direction. Why had I ignored his calls, why had I pretended to be asleep when he arrived at my house the previous day? He needed a friend, I needed him, but whatever instinct it is that makes us crave human connection had gone quiet within me, despite my desperation to switch it back on.
“The meraglim, sent forth by Moses to scope out the land of Israel, encounter the Nephilim, the titanic sons of Anak. Va’nihee vi’anaynu ka’chagavim vi’chane hayinu b’aynayhem, the spies report. We were grasshoppers in our sight, and so we were in their eyes, too. Noah, we all well know, was a giant. To look up at Noah was to be reminded of your own size—in physical stature, doubtless, but also in empathy, in kindness, in all that combines to make an unfailingly good human being. And yet, for all his greatness, never did Noah even once allow himself to look down upon others. Noah, instead, was a person who respected and protected his friends at all times. More than anyone else I know, he was capable of fitting into all situations, he was a person who never once had a cruel word to say about anyone else, he was a person who insisted, even when others wouldn’t, even when—well, even when I wouldn’t, on maximizing only the good in someone, despite . . .” I dropped a page of my notes, paused to retrieve it from the floor, noticed the words no longer made sense, entire sentences unraveled. “Despite evidence to the contrary. And so . . . I’ll always remain grateful”—I coughed into the microphone, trying to make sense of what happened to my life—“even if I’ll always be puzzled, that someone like Noah Harris decided to take me under his wing. I don’t think anyone can understand fully what it was for an outsider to walk into a room, any room, with Noah as a friend and feel a sense of comfort and security that the person who lights up everyone around them suddenly—”
Surges of color, strange geometrical disturbances. I blinked, I steeled myself against these intrusions of hallucinatory light. From my peripheral vision, I noticed Evan snaking through bodies, tears bleeding to his scar. In those eyes, I’d seen many things before: I’d seen vengeance, I’d seen bereavement, I’d seen a strange sort of deadness, I’d seen pride, I’d seen rage. Now, however, I saw only an inhuman blaze. Even from the podium, even before the crowd, I knew he was allowing me to see this so that I’d know nothing remained in him. I stared for a moment, and then he retreated, hobbling through the exit.
“What I want to say, I suppose,” I said, snapping back to myself. I knew what the crowd was thinking, I knew they were right: my friend’s death was our fault, my fault. I didn’t deserve to be up here. Perhaps I didn’t even deserve to be alive. I folded whatever was left of my speech into my pocket. “More than anything right now, I want to feel what Shelley ultimately describes—some great upsurge of all-encompassing beauty, a ‘fire for which we all thirst’ that connects us, that sustains us with love. I want to believe that hovering above us is something unshakably true, or at the very least something that’s . . . I don’t know, cathartic. Something that makes sense of what’s happened, even if it resists human comprehension. But it’s just—” My voice broke, it appeared. I waited for tears; tears didn’t come. “Kierkegaard deems Hashem’s inability to communicate with mankind ‘infinitely deeper than sorrow.’ But that sorrow reciprocates. We strive, each day, to live connected to God, and yet in this moment, when our need for Him is greatest, He feels most distant. And that’s why we fear death, isn’t it? Because Shelley’s only partially right: there is a fire after which we forever chase, it never really leaves us, but no longer does it fortify. It’s at death that we understand, finally, that the fire is meaningless, that God is incommunicable. Sometimes, devastation is—I don’t know, shapeless, maybe. Sometimes we admit we have no real answers. Today, in truth, I have nothing left.”
* * *
MOVING FROM UNTRUTH TO TRUTH, Leo Strauss taught, was not a transition of joy but of “unrelieved darkness.” Such was the period following Noah’s death. Prom was canceled. Our senior trip to D.C. was canceled. Our hard-earned district playoff game was forfeited, Rocky unwilling to stomach the slaughter we’d receive without Noah. Entire days were spent confined to my bedroom, diseased with a spiritual self-revulsion I felt wholly and unremittingly. I skipped the mandatory practice session leading up to graduation. Amir continued leaving frantic messages, though mostly I ignored him. Sophia called, I called back, we never spoke. I heard from nobody else. I scarcely ate, I endured cold sweats and spiked temperatures and fever visions: piano notes, inaudible whispers, amphitheaters. My surroundings turned black-and-white. I sat on the floor of my room, back to the wall, facing the door, knowing in my heart I could no longer hope to recognize what might prove beautiful or lasting.
* * *
ENTIRE NIGHTS PASSED CHANGELESSLY, my conscience deformed, lost somewhere in the dark ceiling. I’ve seen divinity face-to-face, Jacob mused, after wrestling the angel, and yet my life has been preserved. Did he, did Abraham, did Isaac, did anyone ever really carry on with normal life after communing with God, or did they, too, find reality derailed? When I did drowse, I dreamt of gardens and whirlwinds and letting Evan drown. These dreams always ended the same way: with Oliver, Amir and me forming a circle around a body. After too many nights of such torture I could endure no more. Ambien, Sonata, Restoril—anything I could get my hands on. They worked well enough when mixed with vodka, hurling me into dreamless states of unconsciousness. And this was all I wanted: the bliss of oblivion.
* * *
AGAINST MY WILL, I ATTENDED graduation. “You’re too close to entering some—” I was in bed, my mother before me, hand over her mouth. “I don’t want to say it, Aryeh, I don’t, but you’re heading for a kind of . . . unsalvageable depression, God forbid.” I was forced upright, I was dressed, I was in the car, I was onstage. It was joyless, the ceremony. Oliver didn’t attend, neither did Evan. When Rabbi Bloom called my name, he scarcely made eye contact as he handed me my diploma. A memorial video was shown in Noah’s honor. A new award, presented to the graduating senior best embodying the athletic, interpersonal and moral achievements of Noah G. Harris, was given to Amir.
“Congratulations,” I said, after the ceremony concluded. I stood with Amir in the corner of the ballroom, near a table bearing salads, challah rolls, cold cuts.
Amir had the award tucked under his right arm. “Where the fuck have you been, Ari?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “I’ve been nowhere.”
“You just don’t answer calls?”
“I answer some, don’t I?”
“Barely.”
“I know, I’m sorry, it’s just . . . the truth is, I almost feel like we shouldn’t be speaking,” I said. “And I know this is fucked, I do, really, but it’s—maybe we’re not supposed to fall back into anything resembling normalcy? Maybe we’re not entitled to anything that even somewhat looks like . . . regular life? I don’t know. Does that—do you know what I mean at all?”
“No, I don’t know what you—” Amir paused as Donny walked by to fix his plate. He nodded, warily, in our direction. We nodded back. We were used to this. Everyone avoided us. “You and I, we’re the last ones standing. Speaking is necessary, you understand me? It doesn’t mean we’re forgetting . . . what happened. It just means—it means we need each other, because who the hell else is there?”
I touched my eyes. “Where’s Oliver?”
“Not in great shape,” Amir said. “I talked to his mom for a while yesterday. She said he’s still with all these specialists who can’t figure out why he’s so unresponsive to different therapies. I think they’re really starting to worry that it’s, you know, that it’s permanent.”
I saw my parents lingering near the exit, anxious to leave. Rabbi Bloom had already disappeared, eager as he was to avoid Amir and me. Sophia, on the other side of the room, stood with her back my way, accepting congratulations from a crowd of parents. “And—Evan?”
“I mean, I’ve tried,” Amir said. “Haven’t seen him or heard from him at all.”
“Not since the funeral, you mean?”
“What? No, he had the audacity to skip the funeral, remember? And you’d know how I feel about that if you maybe ever answered the fucking phone.”
“Wait, but,” I said, “I—I saw him there, just for a second. When I was speaking.”
Amir frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, I—he darted out as soon as we made eye contact.”
“No,” Amir said, “I really don’t think he was there. He’s been totally incommunicado—”
“Amir.” Suddenly I was hot around the neck. “I’m telling you I saw him.”
“Right.” Amir clenched his clean-shaven jaw, looked at me strangely. He was rather dignified beardless, I thought. A new person. “Right, okay, then. It’s just—well, Ev’s been hiding, you know, since Bloom axed him.”
“What?”
“I thought you knew. Again, I only left you, what, three voicemails about it?”
“I didn’t—”
“Evan’s expelled, Ari.”
I didn’t care why Evan was out while we were permitted to graduate. Maybe Evan had told Rabbi Bloom the truth. It didn’t matter. “He’s the one who deserves the worst,” I found myself saying, my voice rising. “He’s the . . . Evan’s the cause of all our—”
Amir nodded behind me. I turned: Sophia was waiting, still wearing her cap and gown. A scarlet tassel, signifying her status as valedictorian, hung below her eye, just where Evan’s face featured a scar.
“Hi,” she said, after Amir left. She wore no makeup. She raised a plastic cup to her lips. I noticed it was empty.
“Sophia.”
“You’re a hard person to get on the phone.”
“You’re the same way,” I said.
“I think we’ve been evading each other,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “maybe that’s true.”
“Well, I want to tell you that you spoke beautifully. At the—at his funeral, I mean.”
What had it been like wearing a face nobody remembered? What had it been like not thinking about the moral fissure dividing who we were from who we envisioned we’d grow up to be? “Oh.”
“I think he’d—” Sophia pursed her lips, remembered how to smile. “I know he’d be immensely proud, Hamlet.”
Outside, floodlights punctured the darkness of the soccer fields. Human beings, I decided, need crowns of mourning, not veils of ignorance. Why pretend we don’t know our station? Why pretend we don’t know living demands grief, and grief requires submission, and it is only submission that ensures humanness? I kept staring out through the window. Whatever drifted outside, in those fields, had found its way inside.
She said: “We should probably, finally, talk.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s talk.”
“Sophia?” Mr. Winter approached; I received a cautious glance. “We should head out if we’re . . . going to make that dinner reservation.”
She nodded, he stalked off. “I get the sense he’s heard about me,” I said, once we were alone again.
“Yes, well, everyone has, Hamlet.”
What I wanted to say was: I wish I were erased. What I said instead was: “Yes, I know.”
* * *
REBECCA CAME TO SEE ME that night. “I want to give you one more chance to come clean,” she said. She refused to come inside, so we went for a walk down the very street she traversed every Friday night with Noah, the very street on which they shared their first kiss, the very street she figured her children would roam in a not unimaginably distant future. “Everyone tells me to sever ties, you know. But it doesn’t feel right. I don’t think that’s what—I don’t think Noah would’ve appreciated that. And for my own sake, Ari? For my own sake, I need the truth. Please, I just—it’s time to finally hear truth.”
I told her as much as I could explain logically. This proved fruitless. Despite my swearing, she didn’t believe that we didn’t willingly take acid, that we had no credible memory of the night, that we woke to find him dead. “What are you hiding?” Her hands were in her face, she was yelling. “I don’t understand what you could all possibly be hiding from me?” How was I to explain what I’d seen? How could I make her understand what I didn’t?
She stopped abruptly in her tracks, turned toward me. “I don’t care what Sophia or Bloom or Eddie or Cynthia thinks.” She stopped crying. She was close to my face. “I don’t care what anyone thinks.”
I stepped backward, away from her. “I don’t—what does that mean, Rebs?”
“It means I don’t trust you anymore. It means I—somehow, I misjudged you. We all did, I think. Because you weren’t who you were supposed to be, Ari. You turned out to be—” She pulled at the ends of her hair. “Everything changed once you came into our lives.”
Rebecca left me, disappearing down Milton Drive. I missed Noah terribly. I stood under a streetlight, resigning myself to new and everlasting loneliness.
* * *
SOPHIA CALLED A FEW DAYS later, as I knew she would. She asked, at first, how I was holding up. Not well. Was Kayla around? No, and she knew it. Breathless silence. In time: did I have anyone? My parents? Amir? Yes, I lied. Yes, of course. But how was she? “Trying to keep life from disintegrating, I guess you can say.”
“Probably we’re a bit late for that,” I said. “All of us.”
“People are worried about you, Ari. Amir calls a lot. Asks if I’ve heard from you, asks me to check in.”
I took my cellphone off speaker, held it to my ear. “Know something, Soph? All I wanted, ever since it happened, all I wanted is to just—I don’t know, to mourn. To fucking—” Rage was impermanent, time was impermanent, injustice was impermanent, my body, above all, was impermanent. “And I only wanted to mourn with you. But why? Why do I feel like you’re the only person in the world who understands?”
“Ari.”
“Why am I always—why am I so fucking desperate to wrest just one last second of happiness with you?” I paused, bit my lip. “Why didn’t you come when I needed you?”
“I’m not sure how—” I listened to her breathing, phone blazing against my cheek. “Why’d you do this, Ari? Why did you romanticize me like this? So—so unsustainably. You’ve insisted, from the very beginning, on building me into some kind of . . . I don’t know, some idealized entity just because you decided you wanted me. Just because the person you choose has to be special, doesn’t she? Has to be world-changing, has to be—”
Months earlier, in a session with Rabbi Bloom, we discussed Avicenna’s Floating Man. Imprisoned in an Iranian castle, Avicenna pictures a human ushered accidentally into existence. This poor creation, forever suspended in air, never experiences material reality, and yet he is capable, through no power outside his own reflection, of knowing himself. Hearing Sophia’s voice only faintly, random assortments of disembodied sound, I fell and I fell and I fell like this Floating Man, a bundle of impulse and perception fluttering irrelevantly over the abyss of matter, removed always from the human world.
I realized, eventually, that the line was quiet again. “Sophia?”
Somewhere on the other end she cleared her throat. “I said I’m leaving for New York next week.”
I frowned. “Already you’re leaving?”
“Well, I need to go up and get settled and—”
“Right.”
“And I need to get away from here.” Isn’t everyone supposed to love home? “I don’t want to come back anymore.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “So you’re really calling to say goodbye, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
“I just—” No longer could I tell whether we were whispering or screaming.
A hesitant lull. “Yes, Ari?”
“I just need you to know—” Her ice-gray voice. Those opalescent eyes I made out before dawn, amid the unfamiliar shapes of my room. Her infinite loneliness, dignified and seductive, a loneliness worse than mine, never to be breached. “Please, I—I’m telling the truth, Soph. About what happened with Noah, I mean.”
“I do believe you,” she said, without hesitating. “At least, I think I do. And every day, since you’ve come back, I’ve been trying to convince myself of one thing.”
“Which is?”
“That you’re different than he is.”
My eyes were attempting to cry, but it appeared my body had forgotten exactly how to do so, which I found strange, considering it hadn’t been long since I last cried, so far as I could remember. “I—I’m nothing like Evan.”
After the longest time: “I love you, Ari.”
“I love you, too.”
“Goodbye, Hamlet,” she said and hung up.
* * *
MY PARENTS MADE ARRANGEMENTS. They found a buyer for the house, an apartment in Brooklyn. They were ready to go back, even my mother. I asked how soon. Within the next few weeks, they said, after I’d left for college. I told them an apartment would be too small for all three of us. They said they’d be alone going forward.
* * *
LATER THAT WEEK I RECEIVED a call from Amir. “Ari,” he said urgently, after I ignored the first several rounds of ringing, “where are you?”
Early evening. I was home, drifting into one of my pill-induced fogs. Augustine’s Confessions was open on my lap, though I didn’t remember removing it from my shelf. “Why?”
“I need your help.”
The desperation in his voice threw me. “You okay?”
“Yes, I—it’s Evan.”
“Evan?”
“They withdrew their offer.”
“Stanford?”
“Yeah.”
Grief eats away its heart. I closed Augustine. “Good,” I said. “He can go to hell.”
“Ari, listen to me. He’s in a rage, he’s—it’s frightening.” That dark space again: inhale, exhale, focus on the panicky voice on the other end of the line. “We need to do something.”
“Not our problem.” I despised how I sounded, despised the way my room was, at that moment, performing a delicate pirouette into the fading light. “Not anymore.”
“Ari!” Was Amir shouting? “He’s—I really think he’s going to hurt himself.”
It wants to be like you, from whom nothing can be taken away. I shut my eyes, resting the phone against my face, stretching my arms into the air. “How do you know?”
“He totaled his car. Do I need to remind you what he’s capable of in this kind of state?”
“Well, I—why are you calling me?”
“Who the hell else is there besides us?”
I thought this over. “Bloom?”
“Bloom’s the one who called Stanford, Ari. There’s Sophia—”
“—I didn’t say Sophia—”
“—but she hasn’t answered.”
I was silent again.
“Are you home or not?”
But my sin was this: that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures. I pitched Confessions against my wall. “Yes,” I said, fighting against the spinning in my head, willing the world to come back to me.
“I’m coming for you,” Amir said. “We need to find him.”
The search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.
I sprang from bed, threw on clothing. I waited in my driveway, streetlight trickling over me. The weather had been oppressive since Noah died: sweltering days and nights, starless skies, heavy winds, unusually rainless stretches that left our lawns brown and desiccated. The heavens were in mourning, protesting what had befallen South Florida. Amir was there within minutes, soaked in sweat, hands unsteady on the wheel. I had the urge to run across the street and grab Noah.
“He called about a half hour ago,” Amir explained, driving frantically, swerving to avoid a mailbox, craning his neck for any sign of Evan. “To tell me about Stanford.”
“Where did he say he’s going?”
“Well, he didn’t, obviously. He was going on about Bloom and what happened in the mountains and about—” An involuntary pause as he swallowed at the thought of what he was saying. “He said he thinks he might know what we need to do to atone.”
“Atone?”
“Yeah, I mean, he was literally raving. I tried calming him down and convincing him to let me come see him, but he said he was heading out and wouldn’t tell me where.”
He wasn’t home. He wasn’t walking the streets. He wasn’t in the library. He wasn’t at the lake. He wasn’t in Three Amigos. We called Oliver (his mother answered, only to immediately hang up), Donny, Rebecca, Remi, Gabriel, everyone. Amir called Sophia again. It went straight to voicemail.
“I think we should give up,” I said, still replaying the sound of Sophia’s voicemail message in my mind.
Amir braked fast at a red light. “Can you stop fucking saying that? We can’t, okay? We can’t just forget about it.”
I didn’t face him. “He’s not our responsibility anymore. He’s not my friend anymore.”
The light turned green. Amir, fists shaking, floored the gas. “I’m trying the Academy.”
“Do whatever you want,” I said, “but take me home first.”
A pause. “You’re not actually going to make me do this alone?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but we—I don’t think you should be doing this at all, Amir.”
“You think we have some kind of choice here, Ari? You think you can use what happened to Noah as an excuse to abandon everybody? To give up on living, like you’re the only one who’s affected? You think that’s what Noah would’ve wanted from you, of all people?” He stopped, voice threatening to break. “You think, after all else, he’d want to see you become this . . . this fucking shattered and selfish, in the end?”
Debilitating guilt infested every inch of my body. “Fine,” I said, breaking my gaze from the rearview mirror. “The Academy.”
We drove in silence. It was fully dark now, and the Academy at nighttime had an eerie feel. The guard gate, surprisingly, was open. Flickering, silver lights bathed the sides of the building. A few cars were parked in the lot, as well as a small bulldozer and a dumpster. Garbage and desks were piled high outside the entrance. Classroom lights were on. A solitary figure limped through the model temple.
“Evan!” Amir called out through his open window. We parked diagonally, claiming two spots, and, cautiously, approached, hovering at the border of the miniature city. Wind sobbed in my eardrums. I grabbed my yarmulke to stop it from soaring into the night. “We’ve been searching everywhere.”
Evan looked up, his eyes narrowed into blue slits. “Why are you here?”
I knew, of course, he was addressing me. “I don’t know,” I said.
He was shivering visibly in the wind. “He—Amir put you up to this.”
Amir took a step toward Evan, entering the Outer Courtyard. “Enough of this, Ev,” he said gently. “We’re here to help.”
A fragile laugh. “With what?”
Several more steps forward. Amir crossed now into the Inner Courtyard. “Help you.”
Evan released a strange burst of laughter. “I’m afraid I’m nearly beyond help,” Evan said. “Actually, we all are.”
“No, actually, we’re not,” Amir said, pleading. “Because I know this is—well, this is fucked up. But even if it doesn’t seem like it right now, we can heal, Ev, all of us will figure out a way to heal. You’re going to need some time, but this won’t define us, you understand me? We’re each going to rebuild. You can reapply, if you wanted, you can do something to prove that you’ve—”
“You really think I—” Evan blinked feverishly, placed his hands over his head. “Amir, you actually think I give a fuck about where I go to school?”
Amir glanced my way for help, but I remained motionless. “Yeah, Evan. I do. Because you always have, rightfully so. I don’t like to say this, you probably won’t ever hear me vocalize this again, but you’re brilliant and you deserve it, and I know you have a certain . . . emotional connection with the school and—”
“It was all I had left of her,” Evan said, receding into himself. “It was all I had left.”
“Evan.” I rocked on my feet, hands in my pockets, uninterested in his mental wanderings. I had little awe left for Evan Stark. “Why did you come here?”
He retrieved the lighter from his pocket and, as I’d seen him do many times before, flicked it on, off, on, off. “You think this is beautiful?” he asked, gesturing toward the temple itself. He used the lighter to illuminate the intricacies, tracing the stone stairs, the hechal, with its chains of gold, its cedar-lined walls, its carvings of flowers and palm trees and cherubim. He paused over the Kodesh HaKodashim: the oversized menorah, the showbread’s gilt table, the incense altar. “Here,” he said, gently fingering the veil—a mixture of blue, scarlet and deep purple—that covered the wooden Ark. “I really think, maybe—I think this is where we went.”
Amir gave me a look of apprehension, which I ignored. This time, however, I inched closer. “Where’s that, Ev?” Amir asked. “What did—where did we go?”
“The innermost chambers,” Evan said quietly. “The Holy of Holies.”
Amir went on biting his nails, staring intensely, running mental calculations.
“Think about it,” Evan said in the face of our silence. “Think about what happens to those who enter the Inner Sanctuary?”
“They die,” Amir said.
“The problem is that it worked,” Evan said, “it actually worked.” The fire from the lighter trembled in Evan’s hand, casting him in fragmented light, accentuating his scar. “This whole time, when you mocked me for my experiments, I was—I was actually right, wasn’t I? You know it as well as I do.”
“Right about what?” Amir said. “You think we did something right? You think Noah’s death worked?”
“No, I mean that—you know what the Zohar claims? That we each contain just a tiny splinter of the inner sanctum,” Evan said, still resting over the veil. “And so human sacrifice—death, the thrill of a holy death—tears apart the veil, unleashing into the world whatever lies behind the curtain.”
Amir put his hands to his knees in defeat. I stepped past him. “You know what?” I was shouting, unable to see straight. “You are fucking crazy! That night on the boat, you really were trying to kill me, and I never should’ve listened to—”
“Eden, I’m not trying to—what if this is our only chance? You don’t understand that Noah’s death tore down the veil!” Evan yelled over the wind. From his pocket he removed a flask. Instead of swigging, he doused yellowish liquid over the model temple. A benzene stench spread toward us.
“What the—?” I took a step back. “What are you doing?”
“I really think—I know, actually, that we performed what few other humans ever have.” Evan returned the emptied flask to his pocket. “We saw God and we fucking survived! We were worthy, Eden, we—in the end, we really were, weren’t we? But when we tore down the veil, when we peeked at divinity, we left our world exposed to the . . . to the inner sanctum, I think. And now—I just”—he put his hand to his scar—“we have to reseal, I think we have to before anything else happens to us, before anything else is consumed, but I just don’t—”
“Listen to me,” Amir said, desperate, “you’re—you sound unhinged. We need to all—” He trailed off, studied Evan’s face. “Evan, what happened to you?”
Evan stared past Amir, focusing on me. “Before you dropped into our lives,” he said slowly, “she wasn’t in Kenya.”
“I don’t know what that—”
“Actually, she’d never even been to Africa. All that was a lie.”
Suddenly it was crucial I didn’t blink. “What? So where was she?”
“Hiding,” Evan said.
Amir frowned. “What’re you talking about?”
“She was with her parents, boarded up in Connecticut. She was supposed to go on that program. That part was real. But things changed, and she needed to—to disappear for a while. So, Kenya was the cover-up.”
“I don’t understand.” I stepped toward Evan. “What was she hiding from?”
Facial features dissolving under the weight of a boundless, vaguely ecstatic grief, Evan nodded. “She was pregnant.”
His words hung senseless over the model temple. A dull ache came on in my forehead. The first time I kissed her, her high heels in my hands, her tears on my neck. Wrapped around her in her bedroom, frightened to stir, cracking open an eye to convince myself it was real. My need to be adequate, my stomach inverting itself, gorgeous delirium, the hope I was complete now, healed now, happy now. She wasn’t mine and, in truth, I never quite had her—nights here and there, shifting dreams, moments that never lasted. Sophia Winter never once belonged to me. “No, but, I don’t—” I touched the crown of my head. Not even twelve months before, I was obsessed with tragic grandeur. In the time since, I’d seen life extinguished, I’d seen grief’s hold over all people. Since I first learned to read, I’d wanted, more than anything, never to submit to the smallness of my existence. Now, I despised myself for ever having that desire. Now, I would’ve given everything for a final taste of that smallness. “Then all this time—but the baby?”
“She has dreams, Eden, doesn’t she? Juilliard, medical school, Carnegie Hall. Having him would’ve meant giving up everything. But after everything that’s happened to me? I—well, I wanted him. Desperately. And I—it ruined us, I know that now. It ruined us, and in a way, I guess, it ruined everyone.”
Before Amir or I could object, Evan put the lighter to the veil, which shriveled in seconds. He moved to the altar, the flame glowing an incandescent orange as it spread. Amir dove at Evan, attempting to seize the lighter, but Evan, in a surprisingly violent motion, threw him off, sending Amir crashing through the Inner Courtyard, which flattened beneath him. By the time I helped Amir to his feet the Kodesh HaKodashim was gone. Evan sent his foot through the hechal, launching fiery pieces of the chambers into the surrounding shrubbery.
We watched the temple burn. Wind carried fire from the bushes to the palm trees, the garbage piles, the desks. I imagined Jerusalem under siege, Titus slitting the curtains, the steps of the sanctuary running with bubbling blood. Anything beautiful, Evan once recited in class, must first wear a monstrous mask. (“Friedrich Stark, everyone,” Amir had said at the time, extracting a laugh even from Rabbi Bloom, “our new philosopher to be born!”) These, of all things, came to mind.
Amir threw fistfuls of dirt at the burning desks. Amplified by gasoline, however, the fire had already leaped to the top of the mound and toward the school. I dragged my foot through shrubbery, stomping at sparks, singeing the bottom of my jeans. Under my sneakers, an index card, half-blackened, torn from the temple walls: Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold / Have from. Evan stood in what remained of the Outer Courtyard, flames at his elbows, Jerusalem embers beneath his feet.
I found myself yelling at neither Evan nor Amir in particular, pointing at the lights in the building, the few cars in the lot, realizing there were people inside. Cinders swam gently through the air. I dialed 911. Fire snaked from the very top of the palm trees to the second-floor window, climbed to the third floor, descended into the building’s underbelly, bathed us in an incoherence of bright light.
Sirens in the distance. “We can’t wait,” Evan said. He stumbled, dazed, coughing through smoke. “I didn’t mean for—we have to get whoever’s inside.” We charged toward the front door, pausing before the flames. My vision blurred; I breathed fumes; the air stung my face, burned the top of my hair. Macabre screams from above. Unbearable heat, night collapsing over us, the door gone now, given over to fire. Amir tried forcing us back; Evan refused to retreat. Above, a brilliant red neared the top of the building, crowning us in a golden aureole. Raze it, raze it, to its very foundation. Ashes rained upon us, ashes covered our faces.
Firefighters arrived, throwing Evan aside, rushing into the inferno. Evan remained frozen to his spot. His leg gave, so he stayed there on the ground, gazing into the flames. Helmeted men, unfurling fire hoses: water surging in the dark, vaporizing in a fit of hisses. Cars pulled up, neighbors and students and parents pooled into the street, crowded the gate, watched Kol Neshama burn. Medics, policemen, fire volunteers, construction workers. Gio, Niman’s uncle, Lily’s parents, Gabriel’s family, Donny and his younger siblings, Kayla and her parents, Rabbi Feldman sobbing into his handkerchief. In the very back, Rabbi Bloom, glassy-eyed, dressed in a dark suit, his thin silhouette cutting a strange shadow against the curb of the street.
It was summer: who would be inside? A woman—Gemma’s mother?—claimed there was a yearbook meeting. The first firefighter out had retrieved a girl, someone coughing violently, a junior who’d apparently been tapped by Davis to take over as literary editor of the yearbook. Davis and Lily emerged next, unconscious, escorted into an ambulance. Orders to evacuate fell unheeded. The fire had been contained but refused to shrink. More commotion: the junior, recovering on a stretcher, began rattling off names. Gabriel Houri. Jennifer Benstock. Elana Levy. Solomon Katz. Harry Lasser. Sophia Winter.
I doubled over, blood pounding in my ears. From the depths I have called You. Chaos. Stretchers. One thousand lights. O God, if You record iniquities, O Lord, who will stand? A faraway voice: do you ever feel outside the world? A pale figure—aristocratic cheekbones, sharp lips, ash-stained—on someone’s shoulders. Evan, marked with dust, beat his fists against the ground. Someone grabbed at my shoulders, it was my mother, I couldn’t get up. And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.
The silence burst. All sound rushed back, the sound of wailing, the sound of burning, the sound of wind. Evan stood and looked hard at the fire. Rabbi Bloom broke into a run. A stretcher hurried past us: the ambulance was gone. For a moment Evan waited, giving Rabbi Bloom a chance to catch him, and then he hurled himself headfirst into the flames.